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    Some Democrats Embrace the Police as the G.O.P.’s Crime Attacks Bite

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    Violent crime in cities has become a central talking point of Republican campaigns. It’s hurting many Democratic candidates, but not all.In one of the more unusual television advertisements of this year’s midterm election campaigns, Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, accuses Democrats of wanting to defund police departments.“Violent crime is surging in Louisiana,” he says in the ad. “Woke leaders blame the police.”That wasn’t the unusual part. In Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and other states, Republicans have painted Democrats as hostile to the police and as cheerleaders for rioting and mayhem. And even though the data on crime is mixed, the tactic seems to be working for the G.O.P. in many races.What was unusual was that Kennedy was bothering to advertise at all in his deep-red state, and the line that came next:“Look,” the Louisiana senator continues, “if you hate cops just because they’re cops, the next time you get in trouble, call a crackhead.”Kennedy’s re-election bid is far from competitive. His Democratic opponent, a community activist from Baton Rouge named Gary Chambers, is polling in the teens. And, in this instance, the Democrat in question really has endorsed the idea of cutting police budgets.“People hate the phrase defund the police,” Chambers wrote on Twitter in December 2020. “Yet we defund education and healthcare almost every year. I live in a parish with 11 different police agencies, in the 2nd most incarcerated place in THE WORLD. It hasn’t solved crime. Move the money. It’s not making us safer.”Chambers made national headlines during the primary for smoking a blunt in an ad that called for the legalization of marijuana. In an interview at the time, Chambers said he decided to show himself smoking pot because it was important to be “very direct about the issues that we’re facing.” If it’s fair for people to make millions of dollars for selling cannabis, he asked, “why are people going to jail for this?”Given Kennedy’s comfortable lead over Chambers in the polls, the “crackhead” line appears meant to drive headlines about Democrats in general, rather than slam his specific opponent. And the ad is just a cruder version of attacks Republicans have leveled against Democrats across the country, regardless of their actual positions. Often — but not always — the candidates being targeted are Black, as Chambers is. But either way, the racial subtext of the criticism is impossible to ignore.Robbing ads of contextIn Florida, for instance, Senator Marco Rubio has portrayed his Democratic opponent, Representative Val Demings, a 65-year-old former police chief of Orlando, as a dangerous “radical” who is soft on crime.Like Chambers, Demings is Black — but, unlike him, she hails from the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. She was one of 207 House Democrats who recently voted for the Invest to Protect Act, a bipartisan bill to increase funding for local police departments.One Rubio ad, titled “Blame America,” takes remarks by Demings out of context to claim that she “praised defunding the police.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Standing by Herschel Walker: After a report that the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Georgia paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, Republicans rallied behind him, fearing that a break with the former football star could hurt the party’s chances to take the Senate.Democrats’ Closing Argument: Buoyed by polls that show the end of Roe v. Wade has moved independent voters their way, vulnerable House Democrats have reoriented their campaigns around abortion rights in the final weeks before the election.G.O.P. Senate Gains: After signs emerged that Republicans were making gains in the race for the Senate, the polling shift is now clear, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Trouble for Nevada Democrats: The state has long been vital to the party’s hold on the West. Now, Democrats are facing potential losses up and down the ballot.She made the comments on “CBS This Morning” in June 2020, soon after the police killing of George Floyd, giving a measured reaction to a pledge by the Minneapolis City Council to “end policing as we know it,” in the words of one councilwoman, and to rebuild the department with a focus on public health.“The council is being very thoughtful in terms of looking at all of the services that police provide,” Demings said. She went on to elaborate, “The council, along with law enforcement authorities and other community leaders, will sit down and look at everything and come out with a plan that allows them to keep Minneapolis safe, but also bring the community and the police together in a much-needed and long-overdue way.”In the end, the effort to cut the city’s police budget collapsed in acrimony as the political winds shifted.Demings is trying to push back against Rubio’s attacks, though her chances of unseating him appear slim in a state where Republicans have become dominant in recent elections. She has spent almost $8 million airing ads highlighting her experience in law enforcement, according to data provided by AdImpact. Five separate TV ads feature images of Demings in uniform and feature a claim that violent crime fell by 40 percent during her tenure as police chief.In one spot that aired this summer, Demings explicitly says she’d never vote to defund the police.“That’s just crazy,” she says into the camera.Where the crime attacks seem to be workingAs my colleague Reid Epstein wrote today, the Republicans’ crime offensive is hurting Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Wisconsin.“Republicans have seized in particular on Mr. Barnes’s past progressive stances, including his suggestion in a 2020 television interview that funding be diverted from ‘over-bloated budgets in police departments’ to social services — a key element of the movement to defund the police,” Reid wrote. “Since then, Mr. Barnes has disavowed defunding the police and has called for an increase in funding.”At times, the campaign against Barnes, who is Black, has taken on explicit racial elements. “Mail advertising from Republicans has darkened Mr. Barnes’s skin, while some TV ads from a Republican super PAC have superimposed his name next to images of crime scenes,” Reid added.The soft-on-crime ads are also making an appearance in Pennsylvania, where the race has likewise moved in Republicans’ direction since Labor Day. The Democratic nominee for Senate, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who is white, faces an onslaught of ads accusing him of being too lenient on incarceration while in office. (Fetterman oversaw a parole board that successfully recommended clemency for about 50 inmates who had been sentenced to life in prison.)Kennedy, coincidentally, recently made an appearance for Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee in Pennsylvania, at a rally in Newtown, a blue-collar suburb of Philadelphia. The so-called collar counties around the state’s largest city are where statewide elections are typically won or lost — among the mainly white, non-college-educated voters who tend to swing between the two parties.And they’re hearing a lot about crime on the nightly news: A Pew Research survey from January found that 70 percent of Philadelphia residents thought crime, drugs and public safety was the most important issue facing the city.At the Newtown rally, Kennedy repeated the “crackhead” line and said, “Fetterman thinks cops are a bigger problem than criminals.” He added, “A free tip, folks: Most cops will leave you alone unless you do illegal stuff.”Fetterman appears to take the criticism personally, no surprise given that his engagement with the criminal justice system is written on his body.When I spoke with the lieutenant governor recently for an article about his health, he grew agitated after I asked him about the G.O.P.’s attacks on his record on crime.Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania, has faced a barrage of Republican ads calling him soft on crime.Jeff Swensen for The New York TimesAs he responded, Fetterman unrolled the sleeve of his hooded sweatshirt, revealing tattoos of the dates of murders in Braddock, the former steel town south of Pittsburgh where he served as mayor for over a decade.“It’s a smear and a lie, and they know that,” he said, adding that he had first been motivated to run for office by Braddock’s chronic problems with gun violence.“I talked about funding the police,” he said.How some Democrats are respondingTattoos aside, Pennsylvania law enforcement is coalescing against Fetterman. Most major police organizations in the state have endorsed Oz.But that hasn’t been every Democrat’s fate this year. Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general and the Democratic nominee for governor, is depicting himself as the law-and-order alternative to Doug Mastriano, his Republican opponent, who was outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Shapiro’s efforts are not going unnoticed. He’s earned endorsements from several policing organizations, including the Philadelphia lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police, which offered a concurrent endorsement of Oz. Its president, John McNesby, used the announcement to denounce Fetterman, whom he accused of having “a long history of anti-police rhetoric and advocacy for polices that make communities less safe.”Shapiro’s ties to the F.O.P., the nation’s largest police organization, worried some in the Democratic primary this year. But what was once a liability is now a strength, and he leads Mastriano by double digits.If that lead holds, credit Shapiro’s deft moves to defuse Republican talking points on crime as one factor. He highlights his F.O.P. endorsement in a number of TV ads, two of which feature retired Philadelphia police officers offering their personal endorsements. In a city where the rate of violent crime is on track to surpass last year’s record high, that’s a potent message.The pro-police ads from Demings and Shapiro aren’t unique, either. In general election races this year, Democrats have spent almost $29 million on 175 individual ads praising the police or promoting police endorsements, according to a New York Times analysis of AdImpact data.What to readTonight, Senator Mark Kelly faces Blake Masters in the only debate of the Arizona Senate race. Jennifer Medina offers this preview.At a campaign stop in Georgia, Herschel Walker, the anti-abortion Republican nominee for Senate, sidestepped a claim that he paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, Maya King and Jonathan Weisman report.Clyde McGrady and Kellen Browning profiled Walker’s son Christian Walker, a social media star who has in recent days loudly criticized his father’s actions.Representative Tom Malinowski’s struggle to win his re-election bid in New Jersey looks like a national bellwether, Tracey Tully writes.A federal judge blocked New York’s new restrictions on the carrying of guns in public, finding much of the law unconstitutional. Jonah Bromwich has more.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Democratic Dollars Flow Once Again to Likely Lost Causes

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      New fund-raising figures show emerging Democratic stars like Marcus Flowers in Georgia and Gary Chambers Jr. in Louisiana, with no clear path to victory.Gary Chambers Jr. burst onto the national scene in 2020 with a viral video of him castigating the racism of the East Baton Rouge school district. Now, he has captured the hearts and wallets of young liberals with a video for his improbable Senate campaign that shows him smoking a large joint and calling for the legalization of marijuana.He has almost no paths to victory over a sitting Republican senator in a red state like Louisiana. But he has raised $1.2 million.The same most likely goes for the Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, a gay minister who has raised $1.4 million to oust Representative Madison Cawthorn, the far-right Republican, from his North Carolina seat. And for Marcus Flowers, a cowboy-hat-wearing veteran in Georgia who raised $2.4 million just in the first three months of the year to try to dislodge Marjorie Taylor Greene from a heavily Republican district.Every election year in recent cycles, celebrity Democratic candidates have emerged — either on the strength of their personalities, the notoriety of their Republican opponents or both — to rake in campaign cash, then lose impossible elections. Some Democrats say such races are draining money from more winnable campaigns, but the candidates insist that even in losing, they are helping the party by pulling voters in for statewide races, bolstering the Democratic brand and broadening the party’s appeal.“We are asking folks to join us, join us in winning this race and doing the organizing we need,” Ms. Beach-Ferrara said in an interview, “and to say we can’t look at the map and say we aren’t running there. When you do that you get a Madison Cawthorn in office.”As first-quarter fund-raising numbers roll in, the stars are emerging. The biggest bucks belong to incumbents. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a Republican widely viewed as vulnerable this year, was criticized six years ago for anemic fund-raising; this time around, he raised nearly $8.7 million in the first quarter. Senator Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat facing a difficult re-election, raised $13.6 million against the $5.2 million raised by his main Republican opponent, Herschel Walker.Competitive races are already awash in money. Representative Val Demings, Democrat of Florida, raised more than $10 million to challenge Senator Marco Rubio, who raised $5.8 million.A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The Texas primaries officially opened the 2022 election season. See the full primary calendar.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering, though this year’s map is poised to be surprisingly fairGovernors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.Then there’s Mr. Flowers, whose $2.4 million haul in the first quarter easily topped Ms. Greene’s $1.1 million, in a Northwest Georgia district that has given Republicans 75 percent of the vote since it was created in 2012.Mr. Flowers has proved remarkably adept at raising small-dollar donations with a barrage of emails — sometimes multiple emails each day — that capitalize on the behavior of the far-right congresswoman he is running against. An Army veteran who served in combat, he has emphasized his military service, talking tough while attacking Ms. Greene’s sympathy for the Jan. 6 rioters and far-right conspiracy theories.Jon Soltz, the co-founder and chairman of VoteVets.org, a liberal veterans organization that gave Mr. Flowers the maximum allowable contribution, said support was not necessarily about winning the seat but holding Ms. Greene in check and using his run to elevate her profile as the face of the Republican Party in suburban districts that are more winnable.“She can’t be free to travel around the country and spew her lies and disinformation,” Mr. Soltz said. “We’re making her spend her money.”In the process, Mr. Flowers can build name recognition for future runs and might energize the Democrats who live in Northwest Georgia to come out and vote for him, Mr. Warnock and the Democratic candidate for governor, Stacey Abrams.The Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, a Democrat, is running against Representative Madison Cawthorn.Angeli Wright/Asheville Citizen-TimesMr. Cawthorn appeared at a rally with former President Donald J. Trump this month in Selma, N.C.Veasey Conway for The New York TimesMs. Beach-Ferrara is similarly buoyed by her opponent, Mr. Cawthorn, the young face of far-right conservatism in the Trump era. A married lesbian mother of three, Ms. Beach-Ferrara insists her unlikely life story will help her in a district where an influx of politically active outsiders in the Asheville area could change the region’s direction.North Carolina’s 11th House district, with new lines, is slightly less Republican than it was in 2020, when Mr. Cawthorn was first elected. She said Mr. Trump still would have won it by 10 percentage points but the state’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, would have lost by only 4 points.Her advantage two years later comes from disenchantment with Mr. Cawthorn, whose antics — he has called Ukraine’s president a thug and most recently said his colleagues had invited him to cocaine-filled orgies — have prompted seven Republicans to challenge him in the upcoming primary.“As people walk away from Cawthorn, our job is to meet them,” she said, adding, “For those who don’t know what to make of a gay Christian minister, what is very clear with them is I’m being honest with them from the start.”In Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, Mr. Chambers does not have the villain that Democrats have made nationally of Ms. Greene. His campaign is based on his irreverent appeal — an outspoken Black progressive voice willing to smoke weed in a commercial, burn a Confederate flag and call white school board members racist to their faces for defending a school named after Robert E. Lee.He raised $800,000 in the first three months of the year from 18,500 donors. The average contribution was $41, many of those small-dollar donors youthful and excited, the campaign said.Critics say such campaigns are more about building the brand of Democratic consultants than making a play for a Senate seat. The man who created Mr. Chambers’s marijuana and Confederate flag ads, Erick Sanchez, helped run Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign and also hawks “Fouch on the Couch” throw pillows of Dr. Anthony Fauci for $40 a pop.But Randy Jones, one of Mr. Chambers’s campaign chiefs, said the candidate should not be discounted. Mr. Chambers, he said, is taking a page from Ms. Abrams, who energized Georgia voters of color, urban liberals and the scatterings of rural Democrats to nearly win the governorship four years ago, build a political organization and set herself up for a rematch this year with the Republican governor, Brian Kemp.Mr. Jones ran the campaign of another celebrity Democrat, Richard Ojeda of West Virginia, whose House campaign in 2018 was instructive in other ways. Mr. Ojeda, a trash-talking Bronze Star winner, sought to remake his party’s image in his emerging Republican stronghold as more muscular and more working class. He raised nearly $3 million, then lost by nearly 13 percentage points.Richard Ojeda campaigning in Logan, W.Va., in 2018.Andrew Spear for The New York TimesEmbittered by the experience, Mr. Ojeda moved to North Carolina to leave a home state he describes with the same epithet Mr. Trump used for developing countries. He uses his political notoriety to lift his group No Dem Left Behind, which promotes candidates in rural Republican areas, as he builds a new house.Even as he defended his campaign, Mr. Ojeda criticizes the party in ways that echo criticism of his own effort. Democrats across the country dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the Senate campaigns of Jaime Harrison in South Carolina and Amy McGrath in Kentucky, when the money could have been spent on more winnable local races, he said. He insisted he could have won if Mr. Trump hadn’t come to his corner of West Virginia twice.But he also sees no point in ever trying again in a state so thoroughly Republican in the Trump era.“West Virginia is going to have to burn to the ground before it will ever rise from the ashes — that’s it,” Mr. Ojeda said. “In West Virginia, all you can do as a Democrat is stand up, fight the battle so it’s recorded and say, ‘You guys are full of’” it. More

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      Republicans Once Silent on Russia Ratchet Up Attacks on Biden

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      Even as they praise the bipartisan congressional response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Republicans are increasingly eager to blame President Biden for the devastation.WASHINGTON — The Senate Republican news conference on Wednesday was proceeding with the usual partisan criticism of President Biden and exhortations for him to do more — much more — to bolster Ukraine’s defense when the microphone went to Senator Ted Cruz.The Texas Republican, in a made-for-television voice, made a stark assertion: “This war didn’t have to happen — the most significant war in Europe since 1945, since the end of World War II,” he said, before telling reporters that Mr. Biden’s White House “caused this.”Lawmakers in both parties have described their shared determination to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia as the most remarkable consensus in Congress since the aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “President Zelensky has managed not only to unite the West; to a large extent, he’s managed to unite the Congress,” Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, said of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.But the sense of common purpose has not translated into bipartisan backing for the commander in chief; if anything, it has sharpened Republicans’ lines of attack against Mr. Biden.Senator Jim Risch of Idaho, the lead Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, emerged from Mr. Zelensky’s joint address to Congress on Wednesday to proclaim that the carnage depicted in a video that the Ukrainian president played for lawmakers was a direct result of a response by the Biden administration that had been “slow, too little, too late.”Mr. Kennedy traced Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion back to the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the failure to attack Syria after its leader used chemical weapons, and the Russian seizure of Crimea, all of which, he made sure to note, “happened when Joe Biden was either vice president or president.”Absent from that analysis were four years under President Donald Trump during which he repeatedly undermined NATO, sided with Mr. Putin over his own intelligence community on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and tried to bring Russia back into the community of developed economies. Also missing was Mr. Kennedy’s own trip, with seven other Senate Republicans, to the Kremlin on July 4, 2018, after a bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee determined that Moscow had interfered in the 2016 election on Mr. Trump’s behalf.A group of Republican senators visited Moscow in 2018, after a bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee determined that Moscow had interfered in the 2016 election.Pool photo by Alexander ZemlianichenkoSenator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin was also on that trip to the Kremlin, then launched an investigation of Hunter Biden in Ukraine that sparked warnings by Democrats that he was serving as a conduit of Russian disinformation. Mr. Johnson told Fox News host Brian Kilmeade on Tuesday: “The problem we have dealing with these tyrants is the Democrats, the Biden administration, all their policies are weakening America.”Democrats argue that such criticism shows how single-minded the Republican Party has become about tearing down its opponents.“Republicans have defaulted to attacking Joe Biden in a moment of national crisis,” said Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut. “There’s this infection in the Republican Party right now, in which power matters more than anything else, more than democracy, more than the peaceful transition of power, more than winning wars overseas.”Some Republicans have taken a different line of attack. On the far-right fringe, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, declared that an independent Ukraine only exists because the Obama administration “helped to overthrow the previous regime,” a reference to the popular uprising that took down a pro-Russian president of Ukraine — actually two Ukrainian governments ago.She, too, blamed the Biden administration, but said she opposed any intervention. Another far-right Republican, Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, was videotaped calling Mr. Zelensky “a thug,” a comment that Russian propagandists continue to use.On the other end of the spectrum, Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, offered a more comprehensive historical analysis.“I wish we’d have armed Ukraine more than we did, but that’s true for not just Biden, but Trump and before him,” said Mr. Romney, who warned during the 2012 presidential debate of a looming threat from Russia. “But,” he added, “Vladimir Putin is responsible for what’s happened in Ukraine,” not Mr. Biden.Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had managed to unite Congress with his address to it on Wednesday.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesOne Republican House member, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of angering party leaders, said the war in Ukraine is likely to buoy the president’s standing with the public and could mitigate Democratic losses in the midterm elections.Democrats have blamed inflation and rising gasoline prices — problems that predated the invasion of Ukraine — on Mr. Putin. The growing ferocity of Republican criticism could truncate any natural rallying around the flag.But public opinion, three weeks into the war, is mixed. Nearly half of Americans, 47 percent, approve of the Biden administration’s handling of the crisis, while 39 percent disapprove, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center. Opinion is even more divided on the U.S. role going forward: 42 percent say America should be providing more support to Ukraine, while 32 percent say the current level is about right. Just a sliver, 7 percent, take Ms. Greene’s position that the United States is already doing too much.Richard H. Kohn, professor emeritus of peace, war, and defense at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, noted that internal strife has been “vicious” in periods when war was raging but the United States was not engaged in combat, such as during the early years of the two world wars.The political consensus at the start of the Cold War was shattered by Vietnam, when Senator Barry Goldwater articulated a view still dominant in the G.O.P., that the military should be all in or all out. The vaunted unity after 9/11 broke down 18 months later with the invasion of Iraq.Russia-Ukraine War: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4A key vote. More